The Origins of sumHR: How SaaS and HR Inspired Us

When you start a business, you never know where it will lead you. Sometimes, while running one business, you strike an idea for another – and that’s what happened to us at Sutra. When we started off with Sutra, we knew that we will do something different, something that revolutionizes the world of recruitment. We did manage to do a ‘good job’ so far.

However, while running this recruitment business, we met several hundred entrepreneurs, HR professionals/managers, and it was during these meetings we realized that finding the right candidate is just the beginning. These startups/small/medium businesses were also facing a challenge when it came to managing the basic or routine HR operations for their company workforce. This is what led us to our ‘eureka moment’.

In December 2010—after three years of running Sutra and earning the love and respect of hundreds of happy clients—we decided to work on something that would better enable our clients to manage their talent (in a majority of cases, supplied by us). After doing thorough research, we zeroed in on the idea of offering a SaaS-based HRMS (Human Resource Management System) to small and medium-sized businesses.

Though we came from a non-technology background, serving technology startups equipped us, to a certain extent, to face challenges. At Sutra, we believe that we should always focus on quality rather than quantity. So for spearheading such a monumental project we needed someone who was not only an expert in product technology but also as passionate about the project as we were.

Just like all good things in India, we got our guy—Siddharth Gomez—in Kolkata, after searching for nearly a quarter! We are Sutra and in the business of supplying the best talent, and we know when we find a gem. Wanting him to join us, we rented out an apartment in Mumbai for him and sent him pictures of it. Impressed, he decided to fly down and thus began the endeavor that is sumHR.

According to us, the product would sum up all the activities of HR, and that’s why we called it sumHR. Being a part of The Morpheus, the Indian equivalent of Y Combinator, Sameer and Nandini were part of our think tank in guiding us towards the product vision/roadmap and branding initiatives.

Anyways, the dough has been kneaded and the oven is hot. We will soon be releasing sumHR to the world. Until then, keep watching this space for more updates.

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Jay Thaker

Jay is the Chief \”Go-To\” Officer at sumHR. He spearheads sales, support, product management and all things \”creative\”. Before this, he\’s worked in the startup teams at Burrp! and Directi.com. He loves writing whenever he gets the chance. Most often his writing will talk about sumHR, startups, leadership, motivation, inspiration and of course, HR best practices.

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Why SumHR?

The HR realm is progressing rapidly and one needs to stay updated with the latest industry drifts and best practices. SumHR is an HR software that can help to implement automated tasks to ease the effort and get rid of complicated manual functions. It is simple, affordable and powerful payroll software that is easy to implement and light on the pocket.